Relation Module for Non-Answerable Predictions on Reading Comprehension

Kevin Huang, Yun Tang, Jing Huang, Xiaodong He, Bowen Zhou


Abstract
Machine reading comprehension (MRC) has attracted significant amounts of research attention recently, due to an increase of challenging reading comprehension datasets. In this paper, we aim to improve a MRC model’s ability to determine whether a question has an answer in a given context (e.g. the recently proposed SQuAD 2.0 task). The relation module consists of both semantic extraction and relational information. We first extract high level semantics as objects from both question and context with multi-head self-attentive pooling. These semantic objects are then passed to a relation network, which generates relationship scores for each object pair in a sentence. These scores are used to determine whether a question is non-answerable. We test the relation module on the SQuAD 2.0 dataset using both the BiDAF and BERT models as baseline readers. We obtain 1.8% gain of F1 accuracy on top of the BiDAF reader, and 1.0% on top of the BERT base model. These results show the effectiveness of our relation module on MRC.
Anthology ID:
K19-1070
Volume:
Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Mohit Bansal, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
SIGNLL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
747–756
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/K19-1070
DOI:
10.18653/v1/K19-1070
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kevin Huang, Yun Tang, Jing Huang, Xiaodong He, and Bowen Zhou. 2019. Relation Module for Non-Answerable Predictions on Reading Comprehension. In Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), pages 747–756, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Relation Module for Non-Answerable Predictions on Reading Comprehension (Huang et al., CoNLL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/K19-1070.pdf